The problem
Two failures, at opposite ends of the same pipe.
At the inlet, incoming water quality is almost never checked in real time. Contamination is found late, usually after somebody has already drunk it, and a building has no evidence of what its supplier actually delivered.
At the outlet, conventional wastewater systems treat everything leaving a building as a single waste stream. Water from a hand basin and water from a toilet go to the same place, so water that was perfectly reusable is discarded along with water that wasn’t.
Aqualoop is one module that addresses both, and it fits between any two pipes.
Powering itself
The constraint that shapes the whole design: sensors need power, and running a supply to a length of pipe is usually why the system never gets installed.
So the water pays for its own monitoring. A micro-hydro turbine sits in the flow, feeding an energy-harvesting circuit that charges a battery, which runs the control module. No external supply, no wiring job, no reason not to fit one.
The water quality score
Three sensors — pH, TDS, turbidity — feed a polynomial regression running on the microcontroller, which collapses them into a single quality score. That score is what the rest of the system acts on.
A web server stores the readings and handles the parts a microcontroller shouldn’t: historical analytics, periodic compensation for sensor degradation (these sensors drift, and a system that ignores that slowly starts lying), and suggestions for what the recycled water is fit for.
What it does with the answer
At the inlet — continuous verification of the incoming supply, contamination detection on sudden quality changes, real-time alerts, and an evidence trail of what the supplier provided.
At the outlet — the score drives smart diverter valves. Reusable water is routed to a recycling tank for flushing and irrigation; contaminated water goes to the septic line. The decision is sensor-driven rather than assumed, which is the entire point: the same building, the same pipes, but the reusable fraction stops being thrown away.
The interface
AquaMonitor, a mobile app with live readings, historical charts and CSV export, plus SMS alerts for when the water goes out of spec and nobody is looking at a phone.
Where it went
Second place at the Vishwakarma Awards 2026, among 1,054 teams. ₹80,000.
Built by Atharva Chavan, KRM Sadiq, Vansh Ruhela, Diksha Jaurker and Kaushal Gangwar.